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Amazon Crowns ‘Hunger Games’ as Its Top Seller, Surpassing Harry Potter Series

By Julie Bosman August 17, 2012 11:20 amAugust 17, 2012 11:20 am

Take that, Harry Potter.

Katniss Everdeen has triumphed over the boy wizard, Amazon announced on Friday, as the company’s sales of the “Hunger Games” trilogy have overtaken those of the Harry Potter series.

Sara Nelson, the editorial director of books and Kindle at Amazon, said in a statement that since the debut of “The Hunger Games” in 2008, the series has “taken the world by storm, much as Harry Potter did a decade before.”

“Interestingly, this series is only three books versus Harry Potter’s seven, and to achieve this result in just four years is a great testament to both the popularity of the work and, we think, the growth in reading digitally during that time,” she said.

The sales include print and e-book formats, making the “Hunger Games” trilogy Amazon’s best-selling series.

Sarah Gelman, a spokeswoman for Amazon, declined to produce specific sales figures. Kyle Good, a spokeswoman for Scholastic, the publisher of both series, said that Scholastic has 150 million copies of the Harry Potter series and more than 50 million copies of the “Hunger Games” series in print in the United States.

The “Hunger Games” trilogy by Suzanne Collins, the story of a postapocalyptic world in which children are sent to fight each other to the death, has been a huge seller in e-book format and has crossed over from a teenage audience to reach millions of adults. The Harry Potter series was unavailable for sale in e-book until March.

Amazon said last week that E.L. James, the author of the “Fifty Shades” erotic trilogy, is the best-selling author in history at the British Amazon.co.uk, passing J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series.